Marcus Norgaard

History (18) · last changed 08 August 2026, 22:05

Marcus Norgaard Born Year 311 Spouse Eevi Charlotte Helvig-Norgaard Children 8 Species Homo Sapiens / Strain 33A Chimera First appearance The Glass House, chapter 1

Marcus Norgaard (born 311) is a figure of the C9 universe, one of the young people who formed the House of Confidence on Aerogaea 347n, and the one the rest of them treated as the wall. He is a 33A chimera, and the records give his origin as a time-displaced construct sent by Confidence, adapted to terrestrial life. He is known by the glowing blue "3" on his shoulder and by the scar across his right cheek.

He was nineteen in year 330, when the Klak Grove was destroyed and the House was driven onto the Great Plateau^[1]. He later married Eevi Charlotte Helvig-Norgaard. Their children are Torin, Liora, Vera, Kael, Elara, Jace, Silas and Mina. He practised medicine, ran the workshop, and led in the field, and the record consistently shows him doing all three by the same method: he treats a body, his own included, as a problem that can be solved.

The two books covering these years were written from inside them, The Glass House by Leinder Byron and The Silent Decade by Eon. Marcus appears throughout the first.

Early life

Marcus was born in year 311. His memory has logged everything since he was eight: every face, every sound^[2]. The fight with the gang known as the Lost Boys belongs to that early period, before the years the books cover; when he is asked about it later he answers without hesitation, says they fought them and the gang disbanded a few days after, and moves on^[2].

He came to the grove young and had been there at least three years by the opening of The Glass House. He knew the light through the klak leaves at five in the morning, because he had woken early enough to see it once and then every morning since^[1].

The Klak Grove

The chapters set in the grove show a settled life and a man who has organised himself around other people. He climbs down at dawn for morning exercises, and when his shoulder objects he does not mention it^[1]. He and Chryssander work on something structural at the base of Big T while Sam cleans the rifle she took apart on the day she was given it^[1]. He helped plumb the eight klak-wood shower cabins that run on water from the River Rofdon^[3]. He climbs in a way that is neither careful nor careless, and he can fill a silence without saying anything^[4].

When Eevi tests carrying other people through a displacement, Sam reports nausea, Akio reports nothing, and Marcus says "interesting" and means it^[4].

He fought in the arena on the House's last day in the grove, against Villgor, on a white floor chosen to remove any advantage that depends on grip. The crowd was for Villgor; most of them had not seen Marcus fight. He threw his axe, ducked the two thrown back, closed the distance in four steps, put a kick into the hip and three clean shots into the face that followed. When Villgor went for the tail grab, Marcus let go before it closed, and Villgor hit the floor. Then Marcus offered his hand^[5].

The Great Plateau

After the grove fell, the House reorganised on the plateau and Marcus was given the materials for the shelter^[6]. On the descent he went first and did not hesitate, sliding the tight sections and jumping switchback to switchback, into the cloud cover before most of the others had found their footing^[7].

Rad Albert made an observation about him during the shelter months that the record keeps: Marcus is incapable of deciding to stand still while someone he is responsible for is out of sight, so he stands in doorways instead. Technically moving. Technically not^[8].

The device recovered from the cache was BNCY-adjacent but carried no stamp, and Rad recognised the frequency signature from equipment that had been at the first shelter three years earlier without authorisation. Somebody had run a parallel operation six months ahead of them. Marcus was quiet for a long moment^[8].

In the ghost operation he waited out a forty-minute question by deciding it did not matter which answer was right, and opened the case to find the Violet Power Cell in matte-black foam, its glow pulsing at irregular intervals^[9].

When the charge went off on the plateau he took the pressure wave with his back turned and his body between it and the others, without deciding to, the way he does things^[10]. What he said afterwards, quietly, was that they hold the gate^[10].

Medicine

Marcus is a surgeon, and the reason is in the injury rather than in the vocation. His pain reception is severed, a trauma response, so he feels pressure and temperature but not pain, and he runs his own body on instrument rules: after every fight he performs a conscious visual audit, looking for blood, for shivering, for pallor, calculating fluid loss and sewing his own stitches with no emotional reaction at all. He has no warning signal, so he built a procedure to replace it.

His recall does the rest. Treating a patient, he retrieves his own matching injury and relives it, which makes him fast and exact and gives him a reason to finish quickly. He does not describe symptoms vaguely. He says tensile failure, or fluid loss, and cross-references against thousands of remembered injuries.

He studies medicine to master the thing that ruined him. A screaming patient starts his own record playing; a healed and quiet one lets him close the file.

Physiology

Marcus is a 33A chimera, built for absorption and leverage. His musculature is non-Newtonian: under sudden load the tissue hardens, under slow load it stretches, so he functions as a shock absorber. Sustained combat does not fatigue him in the ordinary way but converts stress into density, and he is stronger at the end of a long fight than at the start. His surface area is itself cover for smaller people standing behind him, and the geometry of his joints lets him swing axechucks, momentum weapons that would take an ordinary shoulder out of its socket.

33A slows cellular decay, so he holds a prime physique long past the point others lose it. In age his hair greys and his speed falls, but the muscle does not waste and he hits harder than he did.

His recall is total and permanent, and it does not distinguish between what is worth keeping and what is not. Every failure and every scream is as present to him now as it was twenty years ago.

He is also recorded as capable of working on memory in others, crudely at first and later with precision, to the point of removing a specific trauma from someone who is carrying it.

Character

He reads tension and micro-expression instantly, and he watches faces the way other people watch doors. His fidget, working his fingers, means he is running scenarios; the people who know him read it and wait^[5].

He decides before he speaks. The record catches the expression more than once: the look of a man who has already made the decision and is giving the other person a moment to arrive at it^[11].

What he believed early was that if he were the strongest thing in the room nobody he loved would be hurt, and that needing help was weakness. What he came to instead was that a wall standing on its own eventually comes down.

When the threat to Sienna or Celestine passes a certain point, the sociable version of him disappears and he stops speaking.

Family

Marcus is married to Eevi Charlotte Helvig-Norgaard. Their children are Torin, Liora, Vera, Kael, Elara, Jace, Silas and Mina.